Your readers may be wondering why it is Scottish GPs are so exercised by what seems to be a reasonable recommendation by the Doctors and Dentists Review Body of approximately 2.2% increase in pay. This is especially so in the face of so much anti-doctor spin over supposed excess earnings in recent months.

Your readers may be wondering why it is Scottish GPs are so exercised by what seems to be a reasonable recommendation by the Doctors and Dentists Review Body of approximately 2.2% increase in pay. This is especially so in the face of so much anti-doctor spin over supposed excess earnings in recent months.

What they might have failed to grasp (and who could blame them?) is that any increase is to be deducted from a sum guaranteed in perpetuity because of the destabilising effect of the introduction of a new contract in 2004. With rising expenses, particularly inflation-proofing the salaries of staff, this will produce a reduction in income for the majority of Scottish GPs for the third year in a row.

We are either serving or past chairmen of the Scottish General Practitioners Committee of the BMA. As such, we are used to operating in that tension-filled vacuum between doctors' aspirations for reward and the government's willingness to pay. What is new and increasingly apparent is that we now have to deal with ministers and civil servants who make (or inherit) promises they have no intention of keeping.

Until now we had felt secure in the knowledge that this phenomenon was exclusively English in origin; the fact that it has now crept north of the border is a matter of great regret and counter-intuitive to those principles of honesty that has always marked Scotland as a place apart.

Dr Brian D Keighley, Dr Mary V Church, Dr John A Garner, Dr Kenneth A Harden, Dr David R Love, Dr W Dean Marshall, Hector Cottage, Balfron, Stirlingshire.